Regular updates from the ongoing work on the wood collection of the Pennsylvania State University

How It All Began

“As well as a flourishing library, the school by 1909 had a wood collection containing specimens of nearly all of Pennsylvania’s native trees and large shrubs. For each species, cross sections and radial and tangential sections had been prepared to show the gross appearance of the wood. The next step was the preservation of samples in alcohol and glycerin so that sections suitable for microscopic examination could be cut. These latter sections were to be especially useful in the study of timber physics (wood technology)." E.H. Thomas, “A History of the Pennsylvania State Forestry School, 1903 – 1929.” p. 67

Tuesday, February 28, 2017

I think it was Andy Warhol who was once quoted as saying that everyone gets fifteen minutes of fame sometime in his or her lifetime. Well, my fifteen minutes was boiled down to less than five, but I'll take it. Our local PBS station, WPSU, did a feature on the Xylarium recently, and after an hour or so of interviewing and shooting video, they produced this four minutes and fourteen seconds of a program. And while I think they missed a lot of the essential facts I shared with them, they showed what interested them, and that's what is important, after all.

Monday, February 20, 2017

Much of the Penn State Xylarium collection is comprised of very old specimens, those collected in the first half of the twentieth century. I am finding, as I go back and confirm the scientific names of the specimens that a surprisingly high percentage of them are not properly identified with current accepted names.

As I correct these names, I get the sense that somewhere between thirty and forty percent of the specimens are mislabeled. The obvious implication of this is that further collection efforts will be mistargeted unless these names are properly corrected to the modern name. It also means that unless the trading partner, or collection from which I make further acquisitions has been similarly updated, then I must be careful to confirm the specimen name prior to acquisition.

I don't think I have a qay to quickly tabulate the numbers on the whole collection, but here are a couple examples of how many species names are different than their original designation in the Penn State collection.

Quercus matches my original expectations. Only four of forty-two species, about 10%, in the collection had their names altered in the confirmation process (very slight spelling variations are not included). Those were:

Quercus breviloba, confirmed as Quercus sinuate var. breviloba

Quercus prinus, confirmed as Quercus michauxii

Quercus stellata var. margaretta, confirmed as Quercus margarettae

Quercus virginiana var. maritima, confirmed as Quercus hemisphaerica

Similarly, Eucalyptus has about a 10% correction rate; six of the 56 species in the collection had to have their name updated. Four of those were the result of the reclassification of several of the Eucalypts to Corymbia.

However, eight of the fourteen Eugenia in the collection had to be corrected to modern names, and most of those had completely different genus names.

Syzygium cumini (L.) Skeels, one of two specimens in the collection originally labeled as Eugenia jambolana.

I also find that if a specimen is a one-only, that is, the only specimen of a species in the collection, there is about a 50-50 chance that the correct modern name is something different, and most likely a different genus.

Overall, I sense that somewhere between thirty and forty percent of the collection is being renamed as I go through the name verification process. Most of those renames are not to other species in the collection, so the overall number of species in the collection is not shrinking by that much...they are mostly being named to other species that are unique to the collection.

At this point, I've confirmed about 2000 of the 3400 names I've entered into the database.
Another week or so, and then I'll be back to data entry of the identified specimens. This time, I'll verify the names as I enter them into the database. It'll go a little slower, but at least I'll have a running tally of the number of unique species in the collection.

I encourage collection curators to perform the same process on their collections, now that the internet makes it so easy. I wonder if this has been done to the really big collections in the Netherlands, Germany, Britain, and Wisconsin?

Thursday, February 16, 2017

As I work on the collection, I continually ponder the future research direction of the Xylarium. As I think of different issues, such as "How should I outfit the Xylarium lab for specific lines of research?" it is necessary to research the state of each area of research and the technology being used for each.

Which brought me to an excellent video posted by the Swiss Federal Institute for Forest, Snow, and Landscape Research Wood Science Laboratory. They demonstrate the latest in microscopic imaging that they use to perform quantitative analysis of anatomical features of wood samples; that is, they want to be able to perform statistical tests of hypotheses, specifically on climate change, and they need to have precise data on the size of tree cells and growth rings from year to year for the periods they are studying.

Most of my thoughts around the use of the Xylarium collection have centered around qualitiative techniques, using macrophotography instead of the microphotography and imaging demonstrated in this video. However, depending on what research partners the Xylarium attracts, we may eventually go in this direction.

Monday, February 13, 2017

Still reconciling my partial list of specimens with their accepted names, and working on the Fagaceae family. When I got to the genus Quercus, wow!

According to The Plant List, there are 4,529 named species of Quercus alone. Of course, by far the majority of those are synonyms of the same species. The referees of The Plant List have determined that 633 of that number are legitimate, unique species and have designated them as Accepted Names.

The amazing thing about that, is that those of you who walk the woods often know how difficult many of the oaks are to identify at a glance. Sure, here in America we can tell "red oaks" from "white oaks" pretty easily, but 633 different versions of those?! And to think that botanists originally believe that they had discovered over 4,500 different species? That's a lot of differentiation.

I think that just is a great illustration of how much variation nature provides us with. As the taxonomists and geneticists do their work, they've determined that seven out of eight uniquely named species are really just morphological variants of the same tree.

At this point of my work, I've determined that we have 43 of the 633 different species. I had entered so many oaks into the database that I assumed we almost had them all. Was I wrong!

So many oaks. so little time...

Quercus shumardii, the Shumard Oak. (Penn State Xylarium). From Wikipedia: Quercus shumardii, the Shumard oak, spotted oak, Schneck oak, Shumard red oak, or swamp red oak, is one of the largest of the oak species in the red oak group (Quercus section Lobatae). It is closely related to Texas red oak (Quercus buckleyi), Nuttall's oak (Quercus texana), and Chisos red oak (Quercus gravesii).

Tuesday, February 7, 2017

You have a list of several thousand scientific names, and you want to check each against a reliable authority to determine the correct accepted name.

You decide on a primary authority, such as www.theplantlist.org.

You type or paste each genus name, one by one, into the search bar of the authority, and it lists all the species under that genus.

If your name is the accepted name, you're done.

If your name is a synonym, you click on that name and find the accepted name for that species.

If your name is unresolved, you accept that name and check back periodically to see if there has been a resolution.

Don't forget to check the Family of your accepted name...sometimes they change.

But what if your genus name is not found? Then it gets a little trickier, but you can usually still find your species by using secondary references.

My first response is to consider if there are any logical variants of that genus name. For instance, names ending in -a are often really -um, and vice versa. Do you have others similar names in your list that differ by a letter or two? Check those under the alternate spellings.

I also use a great reference that every serious wood collector should have...The Book of Wood Names, published in 1936 by Dr. Hans Meyer. If I can't find a probable genus name on The Plant List, I use the common name given for the species and go to Meyer. It is amazing that Dr. Meyer and his team could assemble such a staggering list of wood names, much less give the scientific names of all of them back in the days of very slow typewriters. But 98 times out of 100, I find the common name, and the genus...and very often, an alternative scientific name.

If that fails, then I go to Wikipedia and see what results I get there on the unfound scientific name. Sometimes that works. If it doesn't, I go to TAXA (www.woodsoftheworld.org), click on "Woody Genera" and see what is listed there.

I just used this process to resolve the names of twelve specimens that were labeled with the genus name "Anona" within the family Anonanceae. On The Plant List, no Anona, and no Anonaceae. Meyer gave me "Anona" and "Anonaceae" on all the different common names I searched. Finally, on TAXA, I found the genera "Annona", and when plugging that name into The Plant List, discovered that the correct spelling of the family name is "Annonaceae". Problem solved.

That was clearly a case of a spelling that changed over time, but actual mispellings happen more often that you can imagine. I had four specimens of genus Pistacia, two of which were "Pistacia cera" and "Pistacia "vira". Neither were listed on The Plant List. But I saw that there is a "Pistacia vera", so that was logically the correct spelling of "vira". And that made me think, could "cera" supposed to have been "vera". I went back and pulled the two specimens, and what do you know? They're the same! In fact, checking the original notes, the "cera" specimen was noted as a "root" specimen...and comparing the two, it is easy to see that the two are a root and stem specimen from the same plant.

Pistacia vera, of the Anacardiaceae family. (Penn State Xylarium). The one on the right was originally labeled "Pistacia cera" with one accession number, and the one on the left was labeled "Pistacia vira" with a different accession number, both by the original collector (Joseph L. Stearns) and Dr. Norton in the 1960's. From close analysis in the lab, not much question these were from the same specimen. One was noted as a "root" specimen, so the two specimens were collected separately by the original collector (prior to Stearns) and then the mispellings created confusion and the individual accession numbers.

Monday, February 6, 2017

I've simply been going through the colllection, specimen by specimen, trying to settle on a correct identifying scientific name for each. At first, I was just accepting the original identification and labeling of each. Dr. Newell Norton, who had been originally consolidating the collection in the 1950's and 1960's, had been organizing the collection during his work, and having datasheets typed up for each. As he did so, he apparently confirmed the identification and name of each as he went, since some of the specimens had been re-named from their original labeling. And I am not the wood scientist Dr. Norton was, so I accepted the names on the data sheets.

Over the years, though, I've gotten better with references and online tools for confirming the Accepted Name of each specimen, and have begun changing some of the labels as I determine a change to be proper. However, I only started doing that in the last few months; the first 3000 or so specimens or so were simply the accepted name at the time of Dr. Norton's work.

So, when I tried to add an information box on the right-hand side of this blog with the current number of specimens, families, and unique species, I realized I had not reconciled the first 3000 with their current accepted names. Also, in the spreadsheet I'm building (in Google Sheets, so that I can share it online with whomever wants to see it, once it's completed) the genus and species names are entered in separate columns, preventing me from using a function to easily count the number of unique species in the collection.

So, since I'm at this point, I'll break from data entry and go back to the beginning. I've created a new column, called "Accepted Name", and I'll enter the accepted genus and species for each specimen, as determined from The Plant List. For those that have only unresolved names, I'll list those in a separate column. That way, I'll be able to check back every year or so to see if they have been reolved.

Once that's done, I'll use a function on the column to determine the precise number of unique, and correct species in the collection as of my current tally.

Now that I think about it, this is probably a good exercise for all wood collections, if they haven't had their names kept current. There have been a lot of changes in tree species names over the decades, and if specimens are more than a decade old, they probably need to be re-checked. The internet, and advances in genetic research, are really allowing the taxonomists to clean up the family trees of the species. And I'm all for that!

It's a break in my progress on data entry for the collection, but at this point, I'd like to know some good numbers...wouldn't you, if you were in my situation?

It occurred to me today, that after working on the Penn State Xylarium wood collection for nearly three years, I should begin to share the progress and my thoughts on a regular basis. This is the kind of work that is hard to describe and summarize in a single blog post, as I might do on Go Wood, so the logical alternative is to post shorts on a unique site dedicated to the work.

So, to all of you xylophiles, botanists, wood anatomists, and wood specimen collectors who enjoy this sort of thing, here you go. Don't be shy about giving me feedback and requests...this site is for you!

Baikiaea plurijuga, known as African teak, Mukusi, (Penn State Xylarium). Rhodesian teak, Zambian teak or Zambesi redwood, is a species of tree from the legume family, the Fabaceae from southern Africa.

I haven't yet gotten a professional setup to take good photos of the wood specimens, but I'm working on that. Anyone wishing to make a donation to Penn State to help make that happen, please contact me at cdr14@psu.edu.

I'd like to thank Jean-Claude Cerre of Nevers, France, whose groundbreaking work in the field of high-resolution wood macrophotography introduced me to a whole new world of wood, and has inspired me to follow in his footsteps. Merci beaucoup, Jean-Claude!